CHERE CHANCE INTRODUCED ME TO LAOS IN 1965, THE SUMMER I

HITCHhiked alone through Asia wondering if President Lyndon Johnson would soon be sending me back--in a uniform. A smart, high-spirited California college girl, Chere was off to visit her parents in Vientiane when we met on a flight to Tokyo. "Come visit," she urged. "Laos is like nowhere else."

Two months later, after hitching to Nong Khai on Thailand's northern border, ferrying across the muddy Mekong and scrambling up the riverbank to the Laotian customs post, whose single officer was sound asleep, I arrived at the Chance home in an American compound outside the dusty capital. Chere's father said he worked for usaid, the Agency for International Development. The next day, however, he called it Association for Industrial Development. At age 20, I didn't know which was correct--and I wondered why he didn't either.

Chere knew some Air America pilots, who took us on a flight in an ancient, bullet-pocked DC-3 to drop sacks of rice into isolated villages of Hmong tribesmen and then home for dinner. While we ate, a land mine blew over a bus 100 m away, scattering bloody victims. Certain that the mine had been meant for them, the pilots blanched, made frantic phone calls and began to drink--and talk. Air America and many USAID workers in Laos, they explained, actually worked for a U.S. agency with initials no one mistook: CIA. Chere sat silently, but her father, it suddenly seemed clear, was one of them.

By late 1967 Johnson had sent 475,000 troops to Vietnam, and me, after a stint in language school, to Thailand as a Lao interpreter for the U.S. Army. My group monitored radio communications throughout Southeast Asia. By then I knew that U.S. and communist Pathet Lao forces were all over Laos, though the mountainous and remote kingdom had officially been designated a troop-free zone since the Geneva neutrality accords of 1962.

One of my jobs was to keep track of the deep-cover military "advisers" Air America was dropping into Laos to train royalist forces and track weapons and matariel moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Vietnam. Another was to watch over the supersecret communications and radar installation atop Phu Pha Thi, a 2,000-m-high mountain in northeast Laos that U.S. Air Force bombers used for precise guidance to targets in North Vietnam. Our worst day came in March 1968, when North Vietnamese forces overran the site and its 18-man staff. That debacle, only six weeks after Hanoi's Tet offensive, marked the start of an all-out intensification of fighting throughout the region.

While the war in Vietnam and Cambodia has been well documented, almost no details have emerged about this secret war in Laos. There, spies, cowboys, primitive tribesmen running guns and opium, communist guerrillas and troops fought for a decade at a cost of many lives and billions of dollars-all without U.S. congressional assent. Finally providing the missing details, is Back Fire: The CIA's Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam, by Roger Warner, just published in the U.S. A free-lance magazine journalist who began following the story in 1980, Warner has interviewed many of the major U.S. and Laotian figures, gained access to classified records and produced a serious anecdotal study. He details how a once tiny clandestine operation ran amuck and ended dismally, not least for thousands of Hmong dispersed to the U.S. and to refugee camps in Thailand.

Warner's timing is good. A year after the new Friendship Bridge joined Thailand and Laos near where I once scrambled up the riverbank, Laos is opening its doors, eager to be a player, not someone else's plaything. Laos is still like nowhere else, but it's finally possible to begin understanding why.